Month: August 2023

Love is Real, Buckaroos!

I was so looking forward to Camp Damascus (Germane Amazon Link!) — the preorder was my only Cyber Monday purchase in 2022. And it did not disappoint.

As an ace person, it took me a while to get into the Tingleverse. I mean, niche gay erotica? Not the first thing you’d expect for an ace person. Particularly the niche in question — dinosaurs, cryptids, living inanimate objects and so on are the love interests in Dr. Tingle’s books.

Then I started following him on Facebook and discovered what a delightfully positive place the Tingleverse is. And then I discovered the “no-pound Tingler,” which is what Dr. Tingle calls the no-erotica books he writes and also his “Choose-Your-Own-Timeline” series which are also “no-pound.”

Just for a sample of a “No-Pound Tingler,” see Not Pounded By The Physical Manifestation Of My Own Screenwriting Because I’m On Strike And I Deserve To Be Fairly Compensated For My Labor While Studio Ceos Take Record Salaries, which is a fundraiser for the Entertainment Community Fund.

The Entertainment Community Fund exists to provide a safety net for creators in the entertainment industry (writers, actors, directors, etc.) during periods like the (as of August 2, 2023) current actors’ and writers’ strikes.

Now that I knew just what kind of awesome person Dr. Tingle is, I was eager to support their first professionally published book.

And I really loved the book.

The Camp Damascus of the title is a ex-gay conversion camp with a reputed 100% success rate. Now we hit the snag that has had me frozen on “And I really loved the book” all day.

I don’t want to spoil the plot, like, at all. Well, I guess I can talk about the protagonist a bit. Rose Darling is somewhere on the autism spectrum. This leads her to new places in plot and character development where more neurotypical characters might not have gone.

It was also a very fast read. I read almost the entire thing in the first night I had it. I ended up putting it up for the night because of my new adventures in sleep consistency. If I’d finished the book I would’ve missed my bedtime entirely.

I don’t know if this is classical writer’s block or if it’s because I’m under the weather. Maybe I’m just out of practice.

It could very well be all three.

At first, I thought that my under-the-weatherness was due to Sarahan dust. God knows that interferes with my respiration. But on Sunday, I felt like death warmed over. I tested for COVID, which was negative, and took my temperature, which was normal. Since I wasn’t feverish and it wasn’t COVID, and I didn’t know how I could mix around the schedule to get coverage, I went in.

I figured I’d just do the stuff that I wouldn’t have to move around for — phone calls and data entry and things. And I did. I put back the returned scripts that hadn’t been picked up that week. I did the filing. I also called my telemedicine company and got a script for prednisone. The prednisone made me feel a lot better, but once it wore off, I couldn’t sleep because I felt lousy again.

And that’s part of why I’m up at 3 am on Tuesday morning typing a blog post. My prednisone has worn off again. And I was developing a headache. I basically spent all day yesterday (I had the day off! Yay!) in bed and so I’m not actually sleep deprived. But I’m trying to get my brain to sleep at regular times and this has messed it all up.

Hopefully whatever is going on will pass soon (I have three more days of prednisone) and I’ll be able to sleep better.

I am working on my novel. I have spent the time lying awake linking up the pieces of book that I have decided on so that I tell a coherent, or somewhat coherent, narrative. I might have to give my protagonist a procrastination problem.

Maybe with daily practice, like I’m doing now, and like I’m doing while I try to sleep, the words will one day come more easily.

Today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is for The Mark of the Dragonfly, the first book of the World of Solace trilogy by Jaleigh Johnson. And by trilogy, well, it’s three separate stories set in the same world. I’ve read the first two and ended up buying the third as an ebook because when I tried to buy it in hard copy it was *very* expensive.

Anyway, capsule review: Piper is an orphan living in a town on the edge of a meteorite field. Periodically, big clumps of garbage from somewhere else come hurtling out of the sky and the “scrappers” go out into the field and try to find usable things among the junk. Selling the usable things is how scrappers make their living .

Piper’s good at fixing things, so she looks for mechanical items that she can repair. One day she ends up outside during the meteor storm and finds an unconscious girl. The girl has the titular “mark of the dragonfly” which marks her as belonging to the household of the neighboring king, so Piper decides to return her home, in hopes of getting a reward.